Thomas Browne Quotations

Rough diamonds may sometimes be mistaken for worthless pebbles.

We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.

Let age, not envy, draw wrinkles on thy cheeks.

All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living.

Death hath a thousand doors to let out life. I shall find one.

Obstinacy in a bad cause is but constancy in a good.

Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.

Charity But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves? Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world; yet is every man his greatest enemy, and, as it were, his own executioner.

As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason.

We all labor against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.

It is the common wonder of all men, how among so many million faces, there should be none alike.

Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave.

Forcible ways make not an end of evil, but leave hatred and malice behind them.

Though it be in the power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death.

There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read may read our natures.

Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion.

To believe only possibilities is not faith, but mere Philosophy.

It is we that are blind, not fortune.

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.

The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.

To treat a poor wretch with a bottle of Burgundy, and fill his snuffbox, is like giving a pair of laced ruffles to a man that has never a shirt on his back

Come, fair repentance, daughter of the skies! Soft harbinger of soon returning virtue; The weeping messenger of grace from heaven.

It is we that are blind, not fortune; because our eye is too dim to discern the mystery of her effects, we foolishly paint her blind, and hoodwink the providence of the Almighty.

The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real substance in that invisible fabric.

There is music wherever there is harmony, order and proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres; for those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony.

He who must needs have company, must needs have sometimes bad company.

The man without a navel still lives in me.

Be thou what thou singly art and personate only thyself. Swim smoothly in the stream of thy nature and live but one man.

What then is the wisdom of the times called old? Is it the wisdom of gray hairs? No. It is the wisdom of the cradle.

As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they never stretched the pia mater of mine; methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith.

Quotation mistakes, inadvertency, expedition, and human lapses, may make not only moles but warts in learned authors...

No man can justly censure or condemn another, because indeed no man truly knows another.

Every Country hath its Machiavel.

A wise man is out of the reach of fortune.

The discourses of the table among true loving friends are held in strict silence.

I cannot tell by what logic we call a toad, a bear, or an elephant ugly; they being created in those outward shapes and figures which best express the actions of their inward forms.

Many-have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth.

Things evidently false are not only printed, but many things of truth most falsely set forth.

Age doth not rectify, but incurvate our natures, turning bad dispositions into worser habits.

How shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves?

Tis hard to find a whole age to imitate, or what century to propose for example.

He who discommendeth others obliquely commendeth himself (Christian morals).

Rich with the spoils of nature.

There are no grotesques in nature; not anything framed to fill up empty cantons, and unnecessary spaces.

I had rather stand the shock of a basilisk than the fury of a merciless pen.

Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plan religion.

I have loved my friends as I do virtue, my soul, my God.

Content may dwell in all stations. To be low but above contempt may be high enough to be happy.

He is rich who hath enough to be charitable.

Flattery is a juggler, and no kin unto sincerity.

We term sleep a death by which we may be literally said to die daily; in fine, so like death, I dare not trust it without my prayers.

Now with my friend I desire not to share or participate, but to engross his sorrows, that, by making them mine own, I may more easily discuss them; for in mine own reason, and within myself, I can command that which I cannot entreat without myself, and within the circle of another.

Think not silence the wisdom of fools; but, if rightly timed, the honor of wise men, who have not the infirmity, but the virtue of taciturnity.

I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgment for not agreeing with me in that from which perhaps within a few days I should dissent myself.

Let the fruition of things bless the possession of them, and take no satisfaction in dying but living rich.

But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.

There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.

There is no royal road or ready way to virtue.

Who knows whether the best of men be known? or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time?

The vices we scoff at in others laugh at us within ourselves.

Thus is Man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live, not onely like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds: for though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason, the one visible, the other invisible.

There is another man within me that's angry with me.

Think not thy time short in this world, since the world itself is not long. The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity, and a short interposition, for a time, between such a state of duration as was before it and may be after it.

We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.

I would not live over my hours past ... not unto Cicero's ground because I have lived them well, but for fear I should live them worse.

Had not almost every man suffered by the Press, or were not the tyranny thereof become universal, I had not wanted reason for complaint.

All things began in Order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again, according to the Ordainer of Order, and the mystical mathematicks of the City of Heaven.

The mortalist enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution unto truth, has been a preemptory adhesion unto authority.

There is no man alone, because every man is a Microcosm, and carries the whole world about him.

To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history.

But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of Bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.

I can cure the gout or stone in some, sooner than Divinity, Pride, or Avarice in others.

I love to lose myself in a mystery to pursue my reason to an O altitudo.

The heart of man is the place the devil dwells in; I feel sometimes a hell within myself.

Half our days we pass in the shadow of the earth; and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives.

I intend no Monopoly, but a Community in Learning; I study not for my own sake only, but for theirs that study not for themselves.

I believe the world grows near its end, yet is neither old nor decayed, nor will ever perish upon the ruins of its own principles.

Whosoever enjoys not this life, I count him but an apparition, though he wear about him the sensible affections of flesh. In these moral acceptions, the way to be immortal is to die daily.

They that endeavour to abolish vice destroy also virtue, for contraries, though they destroy one another, are yet the life of one another.

Light is the shadow of God.

Were the happiness of the next world is as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live.

Therefore for Spirits, I am so far from denying their existence that I could easily believe, that not only whole Countries, but particular persons, have their Tutelary and Guardian Angels.

If there be any among those common objects of hatred I do contemn and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, virtue, and religion, the multitude; that numerous piece of monstrosity, which, taken asunder, seem men, and the reasonable creatures of God, but, confused together, make but one great beast, and a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra.

To call ourselves a Microcosme, or little world, I thought it onely a pleasant trope of Rhetorick, till my neare judgement and second thoughts told me there was a reall truth therein: for first wee are a rude masse, and in the ranke of creatures, which only are, and have a dull kinde of being not yet priviledged with life, or preferred to sense or reason; next we live the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of men, and at last the life of spirits, running on in one mysterious nature those five kinds of existence, which comprehend the creatures not onely of world, but of the Universe.

Thus there are two books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universal and public Manuscript, that lies expans'd unto the eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other.

Women do most delight in revenge.

Since women do most delight in revenge, it may seem but feminine manhood to be vindictive.

Men that look no further than their outsides, think health an appurtenance unto life, and quarrel with their constitutions for being sick; but I that have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that fabric hangs, do wonder that we are not always so; and considering the thousand doors that lead to death, do thank my God that we can die but once.

To be content with death may be better than to desire it.

I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret magick of numbers.

I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that we were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition; it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life.

Affection should not be too sharp eyed, and love is not made by magnifying glasses.

Where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live.

That miracles have been, I do believe; that they may yet be wrought by the living, I do not deny; but I have no confidence on those which are fathered on the dead.

Gardens were before gardeners, and but some hours after the earth.

True affection is a body of enigmas, mysteries and riddles, wherein two so become one that they both become two.

The religion of one seems madness unto another.

. . . indeed what reason may not go to Schoole to the wisdome of Bees, Ants, and Spiders? what wise hand teacheth them to doe what reason cannot teach us? ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature, Whales, Elephants, Dromidaries and Camels; these I confesse, are the Colossus and Majestick pieces of her hand; but in these narrow Engines there is more curious Mathematicks, and the civilitie of these little Citizens more neatly sets forth the wisdome of their Maker.

Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line ure hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the Art of God.